Hi,
On Mon, Feb 04, 2002 at 12:16:44PM -0800, IT3 Stuart Blake Tener, USNR-R wrote:
> In theory, I agree with your concerns about changing ext2/ext3,
> but stability ought not to be the reason to never improve things.
ext3's primary goal is stability. There are plenty of alternatives if
you want bleeding edge.
> I believe this choice was made, simply to promote ext3, not out
> of the need of users.
> Very Respectfully,
Actually, no, it isn't --- you have flat out insulted the developers
involved. What on earth do you imagine we'd have to gain by promoting
one open-source module over another for such petty reasons?
We evaluated both. Reiserfs crashed and corrupted data. We stress
our kernels *very* hard internally. Remember, btw, that when we were
freezing features for 7.2 --- well before when 7.2 came out ---
reiserfs was still getting bug fixes for serious data corrupters every
month. It was nowhere near as stable as it is nowadays. And ext3 can
do online upgrade from ext2 filesystems, which is necessary for
upgrade support --- reiserfs simply cannot do that.
If you, or anybody else, or the reiserfs support team, wants to add
reiserfs support to the Red Hat installer, you are all free to do so.
The XFS team has done exactly that --- they have versions of the
install images which support XFS for new filesystems --- and
personally I'm delighted that they have done so. Choice is good.
Red Hat tries to offer a reliable and stable base OS, not to add every
possible bell and whistle to the distribution, and frankly our users
get better value out of our development time if we spend it
debugging the supported features than adding code for stuff we don't
support. The big advantage of open source is that you don't HAVE to
wait for us to add such features.
Cheers,
Stephen